The research on stem cells in the recent years have been increasing, with more developed technology and the expanding scientific resources available to us have expanded studies into this new field. I found 3 articles from respected news sources. The New York Times, Time Magazine and CNN.com.
Stem cells are special cells are basically blank cells which we have in our bone marrow that could be used and coaxed to turn into different cells in our body. Cloning is used to get stem cells, or to even get organs to cure diseases and disorders. The three articles I chose discuss theses matters. .
The first article is from the New York Times, March 7th 2003. The headline reads "Doctors use bone marrow stem cells to repair a heart" the news article talks about repairing the heart of a 16 year old boy, Dmitri Bonnville, whom was shot by a nail gun which pierced one of the pumping chambers of his heart, which lead to a heart attack due to the swelling and the pressing of the coronary artery. From research, doctors knew that stem cells taken from the bone marrow was proven to repair organs in animals, but was never tried on humans yet. Operations like this on humans was never done in the United States but doctors were preparing to try it, until Dmitris case rolled in which made him the perfect candidate to test it on. Instead of going through the excruciating procedure of extracting the stem cells from the bone marrow, doctors harvested the stem cells from the boy's white blood cells which also captures the bone marrow stem cells in the bloodstream, and inject the stem cells into the coronary artery that supplies blood to the heart. .
The operation was preformed and it showed that his deteriorating heart had healed a little bit, but there was no proof that the injected stem cells was the cause of the heart repairing itself, but scans was to be made in the future to see whether Dmitri had produced new heart muscle at the injured site to see whether the stem cell injection really worked.